Tag Archives: Shahbaz Bhatti

The culture of giving Fatwas must end in a country which has not yet touched the edge of maturity. The Fatwas when given in routine and without any thinking behind it create havoc. Pakistan, unfortunately, is one of the countries which are fighting a strong wave of extremism and simultaneously mishandling the strategies to bring back the society to normal. Needless to say, the country since beginning has chosen the path that led to assassinations and intolerance. Liaqat Ali Khan to Shahbaz Bhatti, the journey has been ridden with thorns and today we stand not united rather confused and disintegrated.

The irony is that the minority of sub-continent has fought for a separate homeland and succeeded well in 1947, but the same lot has denied its minorities their rights. An Ahmadi has no rights when in Pakistan including his right to life. The incident published in a newspaper tells the story of target killing of an Ahmadi who happens to be the first in 2011 in Sanghar. In fact, according to Anti Ahmadiyya Ordinance 1984, the province Sindh has killed 37 Ahmadis for the identity this country has given them, now what they asked for it.

Today, in 21st century, do we still need to listen to Fatwas which ask you to end a human life and take law in your hands? Do we still want a country where our own people have no rights and begging for their lives? If we do not want this then it is the time to decide to respect humanity and value human life. Rise above everything and let the goodness, preached in all religions, prevail.

The assassination of Pakistan’s Minister of Minorities, Shabaz Bhatti, who was brutally killed Wednesday on the streets of Islamabad, was described as an attack on “the values of tolerance and respect for people of all faiths and backgrounds” by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As the only Christian member of the Pakistani government, the Vatican also considered it timely to comment, calling his death an act of “violence against Christians and religious freedom”.

While it is true that for decades Hindus and Christians, along with Shia, Sufi, and Ahmadi Muslims have suffered persecution in Pakistan, it is necessity to delineate these statements. After all, Bhatti’s death not only speaks to the obvious and continued stranglehold that Islamic extremism has on the Pakistani government, but also, the consequences of its continued influence on the country’s educated middle-class, judiciary and military.

In a claim of responsibility, Taliban spokesmen stated that Bhatti’s murder was a message to Pakistanis of all backgrounds who oppose the country’s long-standing blasphemy law. Introduced in the 1970s, the controversial law makes insulting Islam, the Qur’an, or the Prophet Mohammed a crime punishable by death. Critics claim, however, that it is often used to justify the persecution of minorities.

The real problem facing the Pakistani government over the last forty years is that, while radical Islamic groups enjoy periods of safe haven in the northern tribal regions of the country, they have also proven to be something the country’s ruling elite just cannot rid themselves of internally. Bhatti’s murder joins what has become a tradition of extremists killing liberal politicians at will, and follows the January murder of liberal Punjabi governor, Slaman Tasser, who was killed by his one of his own bodyguards.

Though Islamists have done very poorly in Pakistani elections, the country’s moderates do very little to publicly criticize these types of violent crimes. Further, while Pakistan’s military and intelligence community (ISI) claim to be rigorously hunting down terrorists domestically, Afghan Taliban groups continue to enjoy permanent operating residency in the notorious border region of North Waziristan.

With so much US military financing benefitting Pakistan, the epicenter of the global confrontation with radical Islam, the question remains: has terrorism in these countries become a cash crop? And if so, to what extant is the incompetence, indifference and corruption that allows it to continue to flourish there become an exploitable resource for its leaders?

Trevor Westra is a graduate of Canada’s Laurentian University in Religious Studies. He writes frequently on politics, globalization and the intersections of religion and history at his blog The Theo Log.

After Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, religious “scholars” doubted whether the Ayatollah Khomeini had the right to order his murder. They had no liberal qualms about executing a writer for subjecting religion to imaginative scrutiny. They believed that blasphemers and apostates must die as their religion insisted. But only if they were citizens of an Islamic state. As Rushdie was living in London in 1989, a free man in a free country, the clerics concluded that religious law did not apply to him.

The Rushdie controversy was the Dreyfus affair of the late 20th century. It established today’s dividing lines between the secular and the authoritarian, between those who were willing to defend freedom of thought and inquiry and those who wanted to censor and self-censor to keep fanatics happy. We can gauge how low we have sunk by remembering that at the start of the battle 23 years ago there was a tiny regard for the forms of legality, even among those who were otherwise happy to condemn free thinkers to death. However brutal they were, they respected their version of due process.

The Islamist murders first of Salmaan Taseer and then of Shahbaz Bhatti show that what tiny scruples blood-soaked men possessed vanished long ago. The best way to describe the terror which is reducing Pakistani liberals to silence is to enumerate what the assassins did not allege. They did not say that Taseer and Bhatti must die because they were apostates – or, to put that “crime” in plain language, because they were adults who decided they no longer believed in the Muslim god. Taseer had not renounced Islam. Bhatti could not renounce it as he was the bravest Christian in Pakistan, who campaigned for equal rights for persecuted minorities with the dignity and physical courage of a modern Martin Luther King.

Nor did their assassins claim that their targets had committed the capital crime of blasphemy. Taseer and Bhatti had not said that the Koran, like the Talmud and the New Testament, was the work of men not god. They did not denounce Muhammad’s morality or offer any criticism of his life and teaching. If you wanted to reduce the whirling, brilliant narrative of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to a single sentence, you could say that it was in part a “blasphemous” account of the early history of Islam. Taseer and Bhatti attempted nothing so brave. They confined themselves to making the modest point that Pakistan’s death penalty for blasphemy was excessive and barbaric, and that was enough to condemn them. Their killers murdered them for the previously unknown crime of advocating law reform: blew them away for the new offence of blaspheming against blasphemy.

One Pakistani journalist I spoke to described his fellow liberals as members of a persecuted minority, who now knew that if they spoke out, they would be shot down. Salmaan Taseer’s daughter, Shehrbano, wrote a heartbreaking piece for the Guardian in which she despaired of a “spineless” Pakistani elite that was too frightened to praise her father or condemn his murderers.

In the networked world, censorship by the authoritarian state or clerical paramilitaries is meant to matter less. Technology enthusiasts can point to Twitter revolutions as proof of how emancipatory democratic ideas seep into apparently closed societies. But the ideas that Pakistanis need from America, Europe or “the west” to help fight armed theocracy are not there for surfers to find.

Fear plays its part in keeping western opinion quiet as well. It is hard to credit, but liberal society responded pretty well to the threat to Rushdie in 1989. Penguin refused to withdraw the Satanic Verses. Booksellers ignored threats and bombs and carried on selling it. But once the global wave of terror had passed, no one wanted to put themselves through what Rushdie and Penguin had been through, and a silence descended. Even the supposedly militant “new atheists,” whom genteel commentators damn for their vulgarity, steer clear of religions that might kill them. Close readers of Richard Dawkins will notice that almost all his examples of clerical folly are drawn from the Catholic and American evangelical churches, whose congregations are unlikely to firebomb his publishers.

The fear is still present. Last month, four men were convicted of slashing the face and fracturing the skull of Gary Smith, a London teacher who had made the mistake of taking the windy official pronouncements about “promoting diversity” seriously and taught Muslim girls about Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism. Political violence comes from the British National Party, English Defence League and various splinter groups from the IRA, as well as Islamists, and that is before you raise your gaze and examine the assorted gun-totting crazies who inhabit the fringe of American politics.

The difference between Islamism and the rest is that liberals are happy to denounce white extremists, while covering up militant Islam with the wet blanket of political correctness. They do not confine themselves to saying that, of course, society must protect people from being murdered for their religion, as Slobodan Milosevic murdered the Bosnian Muslims, and punish employers who refuse jobs to members of creeds they dislike, as Protestant employers in Northern Ireland once refused to hire Catholics. They maintain it is illicit to criticise religious ideas. Thus, along with the admittedly faint fear of violence, western writers who want to provide arguments against religious misogyny, homophobia, racism and censorship must also live with the fear that their contemporaries will accuse them of orientalism or Islamophobia.

The world may pay a price for the monumental blunder of treating religious ideologies – which are beliefs that men and women ought to be free to accept or reject – as if they were ethnicities, which no man or woman can change. Not the smallest reason why the Arab revolution is such an optimistic event is that al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood have been left as gawping bystanders. Their isolation cannot last. Eventually, if Arab states move towards democracy, there will be a confrontation with political Islam. Arab liberals, like Pakistani liberals, will search the net for guidance. They will discover that far from offering strategies that might help, timorous western liberals have convinced themselves that it is “racist” to criticise raging fanatics who no longer even bother to pretend that they are anything other than liberalism’s mortal enemies.

PAKISTAN: Pakistan Peace Council terms the murder of Shahbaz Bhatti an attempt on the parliament’s right to debate legislative issues Karachi, March 04, 2011:

The Pakistan Peace Coalition (PPC) strongly condemns the brutal murder of the Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti in Islamabad on March 03, 2011. The murder on the pretext of the Minister’s opposition to the contentions of Blasphemy Laws is outrageous and an open challenge to the future stability of Pakistan, a statement issued by the Pakistan Peace Coalition read.

The PPC observed that Minister Bhatti was killed merely two months after the assassination of Governor Punjab Salman Taseer, who too was silenced for his open remarks about the blasphemy laws. “The blame for Shahbaz Bhatti’s murder cannot just be attributed to the government alone. There are serious questions regarding the roles of the political parties, the parliament, the media, the judiciary and the security establishment, all having created an environment where fundamentals related to the right to live, minorities protection, freedom of speech, rule of law, parliament’s right to debate and amend laws are being challenged, and mobs and street forces are being manipulated to take law into their own hands.”

The PPC emphasised that the Blasphemy Laws is an issue for the parliament to debate, and not for the religious forces to decide. They neither have an electoral base nor do they have any relevance in the vision of a progressive national order. Likewise, the judiciary has a responsibility to uphold the sanctity of the constitutional provision of the right to live, freedom of speech and other fundamental constitutional guarantees. Time and again, the religious right has issued open decree inciting masses to murder and threaten the safety and wellbeing of individuals over issues that are a prerogative of the public representatives to decide. The religious forces neither have the electoral mandate nor do they represent a wider section of the population. The concerned authorities’ failure to take note of the series of violations of the rule of law by the religious mobs have made a direct contribution to the murder of Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti, while the life of another parliamentarian Sherry Rehman remains in danger for the same reason.

Declaring the Minorities Affairs Minister’s murder as another attempt to derail the democratic process, the PPC also criticised the role of progressive political parties in the parliament over the issue of the blasphemy laws. Today’s parliament carries the combination of the most progressive and democratic forces the country has ever had, yet their deafening silence over an issue that has been claiming one life after another is disappointing. We have seen that all those who sought to rationalise the debate on the blasphemy issue, including Gov. Salman Taseer, MNA Sherry Rehman and Minister Shahbaz Bhatti were not only isolated by the state, their fellow public representatives too did nothing to support their stand either in the house of representatives or in the public domain. As a result, we lost two leading lights upholding the right of the minorities. Pakistan’s current parliamentarians need to understand that it is not merely about the blasphemy laws, it is about the Parliament’s right to debate issues in the House that is being challenged. If the Parliament will continue to allow legislative issues discussed and decided on the streets, there are little chances of democratic process to survive in the country.

The PPC observed that Shahbaz Bhatti’s murder took place in spite of the Government’s public assertion, repeated ad nauseam, that it has no intention whatsoever to amend the Blasphemy Law! If the Prime Minister himself rules out any amendment to the law that has blatantly threatened citizens’ protection, and yet a Minorities Affairs Minister is murdered, there are clear signals that people who wish to take over the country would suppress all voices that stand in opposition to their regressive views.

The PPC cautioned that situation similar to 1977 is developing in the country. The recent series of events point to the empowerment of the religious forces by the security stablishment of the country. Various religious parties and sectarian groups seem to have set aside their traditional hatred of each other and are trying to cobble together a politico-religious platform from which to participate in the next elections with a violence-prone agenda of religious extremism. This is nothing short of a national disaster with much graver consequences this time.

Two months ago, after Governor Salmaan Taseer’s murder and the jubilant support for the policeman who killed him, religious scholars in Pakistan told us that since common people don’t know enough about religion they should leave it to those who do – basically anyone with a beard.

Everyone thought it made a cruel kind of sense. So everyone decided to shut up: the Pakistan Peoples party (PPP) government because it wanted to cling to power, liberals in the media because they didn’t want to be the next Taseer. The move to amend the blasphemy law was shelved.

It was an unprecedented victory for Pakistan’s mullah minority. They had told a very noisy and diverse people to shut up and they heard back nothing but silence. After Pakistan’s only Christian federal minister, Shahbaz Bhatti – the bravest man in Islamabad – was murdered on Tuesday, they were back on TV, this time condemning the killing, claiming it was a conspiracy against them, against Islam and against Pakistan. The same folk who had celebrated one murder and told us how not to get murdered were wallowing in self pity.

In a very short span of time, Pakistan’s mullahs and muftis have managed to blur the line between what God says and what they say. The blasphemy law debate was about how to prosecute people who have committed blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an. Since repeating a blasphemy, even if it is to prove the crime in a court of law, is blasphemous, no Pakistani has a clear idea what constitutes blasphemy. Taseer had called the blasphemy law “a black law” and was declared a blasphemer. The line between maligning the Holy Prophet and questioning a law made by a bunch of mullahs was done away with. What would come next?

During the last two months sar tan se juda (off with their heads) has become as familiar a slogan as all the corporate songs about the Cricket World Cup. Banners appeared all over Karachi and Islamabad last week demanding death for a Pakistani writer. The only problem is that nobody quite knows what she has written. Her last book came out more than eight years ago and, if it wasn’t so scary, it would be ironic that it is called Blasphemy. It was a potboiler set mostly in religious and spiritual leaders’ bedrooms. The banners condemning her say that not only she has insulted the prophet, she has insulted religious scholars.

So now disagreeing with anyone who has a beard and armed bodyguards can get you killed. The PPP government has tried to appease this lot by silencing the one-and-a-half liberal voices it had. What it didn’t realise is that you can’t really appease people who insist their word is God’s word, their honour as sacred as the Holy Prophet’s. In Pakistan, silence is the mother of all blasphemies. Most Pakistanis are committing that blasphemy and being punished for it.

Mohammed Hanif is a journalist and author of the novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes

I am convinced that the religious clerics have a big share in the rise on intolerance towards minorities. A country like Pakistan where literacy rate is low and people are naïve when it comes on opinion making, it becomes easy to be successful in manipulating people’s minds. The manipulation of their opinions by those who are extremists in their views and beliefs always meet disaster. These clerics have played an ugly role most of the times and their preaching of hate speech always led to more sufferings and disaster for minorities. Recently, two Christian brothers were killed by unidentified people outside the court on blasphemy charges. The whole country was saddened and people from different walks of life condemned the murder. The President of Pakistan has also condemned the murder and called for an investigation. But when the Federal Minister for Minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, condemned the killing and called both the brothers as victims, he was accused of committing blasphemy by a religious cleric. His statement published in Daily Jasarat, a Pakistani Urdu daily newspaper, falls in the category of hate speech where he incited Muslims to violence saying if Mr. Bhatti committed blasphemy, he would be beheaded. The provocation to kill another Christian so openly while using the medium of newspaper is very alarming. The demand for his resignation has no logic as he is among those few voices which can legitimately pursue the interests of Christians. It seems like an attempt to crush that rare voice as well. Such statements encourage illiterate people with weak minds to kill people and get away with the heinous crime on the pretext of blasphemy. The government should take a serious notice of this threat and should arrest Allama Hammadi for inciting murder against the Minister. Those newspapers which actively participate in propagating hate speech should be banned if they do not agree to stop doing so. The incidents of Faisalabad, Koriaan, and Gojra are still fresh in minds and the wounds are bleeding. Any other incident of this nature will alienate the Christians further with a loss of trust in law and state. The government should take some tough measures to stop hate speech and propaganda against minorities otherwise more people will loose lives.

Below is the story:

Islamabad (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Muslim groups insist that the murder of two Christian brothers, Emmanuel and Sajid Rashid, gunned down in Faisalabad last Monday after they were accused of blasphemy, was justified. They also want Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, to resign because he condemned the murder. Meanwhile, police are investigating the crime and might have identified one of the perpetrators.

In a statement that appeared in the Urdu daily Jasarat, Islamic cleric Allama Ahmed Mian Hammadi said, “It is not a cruelty to kill blasphemers; rather blasphemy itself is such an enormous brutality that the one who commits it does not have the right to live in this world. There is no pardon for the blasphemer.”

The two Christian brothers were arrested after being charged with blasphemy, but their trial appeared to be moving towards acquittal for lack of evidence. Nevertheless, handcuffed and without a chance to defend themselves or escape, they were shot dead by masked gunmen just outside of the courthouse.

Bhatti condemned the murder, saying the charges were false, fabricated by someone who had a grudge against the brothers. He said that no one has the right to take the law in their own hands, and that the blasphemy law should be changed to prevent abuses.

For Hammadi, Bhatti ought to resign for saying that the murder was due to an abuse of the blasphemy. In fact, in the cleric’s opinion, the incident was due to the non-implementation of the blasphemy law. “The two brothers were killed after Muslims became angry.”

On top of that, Hammadi said that if Bhatti committed blasphemy [for condemning the murder and criticising the abuse of the blasphemy law] he should be beheaded” as well. The Christians who protested in the streets and allegedly threw stones at Muslim houses after the double murder should also be arrested.

On Thursday, the chief justice of Lahore High Court in Punjab, Khwaja Mohammad Sharif, ordered an investigation into the brothers’ murder, in response to a request by the Government of Punjab.

Media have criticised Faisalabad Regional Police Officer Aftab Ahmad Cheema for the inadequate protection provided to the accused, despite threats. Police sources indicate that a man called Rana Maqsood, a Muslim, was arrested in connection with the case.